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(2009) Essays on Levinas and law, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

Rethinking justice with Levinas

Sarah E. Roberts-Cady

pp. 240-255

Emmanuel Levinas argues that justice is meaningful only to the extent that other persons are encountered in their individuality, as neighbors, and not merely abstract citizens of a political community. Further, he claims that equality before the law only emerges from this unequal, asymmetrical moral responsibility for others. Levinas writes, "The equality of all is borne by my inequality, the surplus of my duties over my rights. The forgetting of self moves justice."1 Thus Levinas writes that the call to justice is a call to think the abstraction of law together with the uniqueness of every face, the call to think the equality of every citizen together with their inequality. The following is an exploration of Levinas's views on justice. I will contend that, despite his revolutionary ideas about the origins of justice, Levinas ultimately appeals to a very traditional view of justice in which persons are considered equal and comparable, and responsibilities and rights are distributed evenly among them. In response to Levinas, I will argue that insofar as justice is constructed by and for the ethical relationship, it must also be deconstructed by that relationship. If one takes seriously Levinas's claim that asymmetrical ethical responsibility is the origin of justice, then one must also reject Levinas's suggestion that justice requires viewing persons and responsibilities as comparable and symmetrical.

Publication details

DOI: 10.1057/9780230234734_14

Full citation:

Roberts-Cady, S. E. (2009)., Rethinking justice with Levinas, in D. Manderson (ed.), Essays on Levinas and law, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 240-255.

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